I suppose I owe you guys an explanation as to the lack of updates. There’s not much to say. I’m tired.

The Rift was a story I started working on when I was in high school. The first drawings of Niko were done when I was 13 or so. It took several years and many many reworkings of the story before I finally started to make real progress on the comic. If I’d followed this comic to its completion it would have been over 1000 pages long. By all accounts the story was very ambitious for a first comic, particularly one written by a teenager. I think it shows, there are too many characters trying to do too many things all at once. It has some good points I think, the characters particularly I’m still very attached too, though I do wish to rework them significantly, I still have plans for them.

The first page of this comic went online on December 10th, 2003, it’s been more than five years and 450 pages and the comic never found much of an audience. I’m sure many of you are reading this and thinking “but I liked it!” but really it was just you. I appreciate it, honestly, but if I ever want to be a professional, and I do, I need to be able to leave behind projects that aren’t working. And this one wasn’t working, I probably should have given up on it long ago.

Anyway here’s the unfinished pencils for page 456, which I started on but never finished.
If you look here you’ll see some designs for reusing some of these characters in a new setting. I’m doing more designs and I hope to be getting a couple of test pages for that comic up in the next few months. I hope you guys will give it a chance.

Thanks for all the support, you guys were great, what few of you there seemed to be. <3

I’m a little wary about announcing this now, but I may as well go ahead and do it.

I’m thinking about ending this comic early.

When I originally conceived of this story it was made up of several parts. Five originally, but it’s since been scaled back to two. They wouldn’t be labeled that way in the comic, but in my mind they are. The first part would end at the end of chapter 9. I’m thinking about ending the story at chapter 9.
My primary reason being that I’ve been working on this comic for a long time and not had a lot to show for it. It’s not very popular and I haven’t been able to make any sort of business out of it. I’ve wanted to be a professional comic artist for a long time and Rift isn’t the comic that’s going to get me there. I think maybe once it reaches a good stopping point I should just leave it for a while and make more time to work on other things. I might pick it back up again in the future.

Mind you the end of chapter nine is a ways off (it’s still early in chapter seven) so Rift’ll have at least another year, possibly two, of solid updates. If the comic somehow becomes wildly popular and/or successful in that time I’ll definitely keep going to the end. Think of it like a TV show that was planned to have two seasons but was canceled after the first one due to poor ratings.

What is this?

The Rift was a fantasy webcomic that I started in late 2003. It plodded along for a while, never really finding much of an audience despite regular updates and several attempts at advertising. It was humanely euthanized in early 2010.